“Never be rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be quick to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you be upon earth; therefore let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5. 2)

Some people find small talk difficult. There is an expectation that we have to fill silence with a discussion about the weather. There’s no harm in that. But neither is there any harm in being sparing with words. Sometimes a quiet and considered sentence is worth more than hundreds of words without proper thought. God does not need our small talk. God knows everything that we come to him with: and so we do well to meditate on this verse in the context of our prayer life: even just to sit in the house of the Lord in silence is prayer enough.